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“Tower Heist,” “Melancholia,” and the battle over video on demand.

At the risk of invoking Freud, you have to wonder why movie stars are attracted to big, long films about towers. “The Towering Inferno” had Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, and William Holden; it also had Fred Astaire and O. J. Simpson, a pairing so exquisite that Luis Buñuel must have wished he’d thought of it first. Now we have “Tower Heist,” which features Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Alan Alda, Casey Affleck, Téa Leoni, Matthew Broderick, and Judd Hirsch. None of these, I concede, are up there with Fred Astaire, but, then, who is? What counts is safety in numbers—actors mustering together to lend bulk and momentum to a tale that they know to be dumb. The difference is that in 1974 they got away with it.

The director of the new film is Brett Ratner, previously responsible for the “Rush Hour” trilogy. The origins of his style are unclear, but the influence of, say, early Fellini is less easy to detect than that of Cuisinart. Toss everything you can find, starting with roughly diced plots, into the blender, press “Pulse,” and pray: such appears to be the method behind “Tower Heist.” Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, the building manager of the Tower, a Trump-flavored pile of high-end apartments on Central Park West. The wise guy in the penthouse is Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), who helps the Tower’s staff members invest their savings in a pension fund, scrupulously following the edicts of a philosopher named Ponzi. When Kovacs and his colleagues discover that Shaw has swindled them, they plan their revenge.

If you can call it a plan. Few things are more foolishly satisfying than a good heist movie, but, unless the heisters are seen to devise their great day with precision, everything slumps, and so it proves with Ratner on the case. The climax of the crime shows a luscious old Ferrari being dangled from the Tower’s roof, while down below a giant Snoopy floats by in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Although it’s a pleasingly brazen image, you can imagine Ratner’s command to his team of writers (three of them are credited with the story, and two with the screenplay): “Get me to the car-dangle. I don’t care how. Just get me there.” No audience objects to suspending its disbelief, but we do expect something in return, and the film’s refusal of all known logic has the tang of both indolence and insult. How can our heroes be sure of sneaking past security? Because everyone in security will rush outside to gaze up at Snoopy, that’s how. Good grief, Charlie Brown.

None of this is fair to the director of photography, Dante Spinotti, who shot “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Heat,” and “L.A. Confidential,” and who kicks off “Tower Heist” with a dazzling shot of the eyes of Benjamin Franklin. Pull back, and it turns into a vast hundred-dollar bill, painted on the bottom of Shaw’s swimming pool, atop the Tower. Nothing else is as loaded as that image, which makes you ask what Spinotti might have delivered in tandem with a wiser or angrier director. The notion of a theft from the thieves—from those who are lapped in lofty, screw-you wealth—is a tempting one right now, but “Tower Heist” passes the buck. Only one character seems burned by the shame of the system, and that is Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick), who lost his job at Merrill Lynch and now faces eviction from the Tower. Broderick has always found flecks of exasperation and near-despair even in his cheeriest roles, and this cruddy movie has one perfect moment, in which Fitzhugh, having moved out to a motel room, is asked what he’s up to. “I’m thinking of becoming a male prostitute,” he says, instantly and without complaint. It gets a laugh, because Broderick underplays it so well, and because you fear it could be true.

Strange to report, “Tower Heist” might nonetheless become a footnote in the history of cinema, as might Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” another new release. The two works have almost nothing in common, except that both show clumps of unlikable people behaving implausibly in confined spaces. More important, both are enmeshed in the squabble over video on demand, or VOD, which allows customers to view a new, or barely used, film in the nest of their own home. On October 5th, Universal Pictures announced a trial project, whereby “Tower Heist” would be available to half a million households in Atlanta and Portland, Oregon, three weeks after its appearance in movie theatres, at a cost of $59.99.

One’s immediate reaction to this news was: sixty bucks! For a Brett Ratner movie! It’s like one of those cafés in Weimar Germany where a glass of beer cost you four billion marks. The stakes were raised considerably by reports that NATO was incensed by this latest move in the battle of VOD. For one heady morning, I was under the impression that air strikes would be launched on Universal. Only then was it explained to me that NATO stands for the National Association of Theatre Owners, who regard the “Tower Heist” experiment, and similar ventures, as the thin end of a deadening wedge. Download a Ben Stiller movie in Atlanta, and you wind up, a few years later, with a nation of vacant auditoriums. Moviegoers will still watch movies; they just won’t go.

“Can you blame us?” they will cry. “Who wants to pay for a sitter, drive twenty miles in the rain, and sit in a fug of vaporized popcorn butter next to people who are either auditioning for ‘Contagion 2’ or texting the Mahabharata to their second-best friends?” And the answer is: me. I’m with NATO on this, all the more tenaciously because we will, in the final reckoning, lose. Universal actually backed down in the scrap over “Tower Heist” and cancelled the VOD release, but, like other studios, it will surely return to the fray. And the outcome? Showmen like James Cameron, I suspect, will continue to haul us off our couches for the grand, marquee events, but smaller fare may be streamed to us direct, and new films whittled down into just another channel on TV.

There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice—preferably an exhaustive menu of it—pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended.

“Melancholia” is a prime exhibit in the argument, because, although it hits movie screens on November 11th, it has been available via VOD since October 7th. So is it out or isn’t it? And can anyone think of a more unsuitable film to watch in a living room? Von Trier’s latest fable is nothing without its blaze of majesty—or, as his detractors would say, its bombast. The middle of the film is an itchy and tremulous account of a wedding party at a Swedish country house, in which the bride, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), keeps wandering off to take a bath or to have sex on the golf course with someone other than the groom, while maintaining frayed relations with her foul-tempered mother (Charlotte Rampling), her feckless father (John Hurt), and her anxiety-ridden sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who looks nothing whatever like her. Fun for everyone!

Meanwhile, the earth is about to die. Justine, steeped in chronic depression, feels that her world is caving in, and, as if in sympathy, our world does the same—bracing itself to be swallowed by a vast blue planet that has, till now, been “hiding behind the sun.” Few astronomers will vouch for this game of cosmic peekaboo, yet when we see the swallowing in action, at the preëmptive start of the film, it’s quite a spectacle—gusted along by the prelude to “Tristan and Isolde,” and intercut with slow-motion shots of Justine, in her wedding dress, dragging skeins of heavy gray yarn like a convict in chains, and of Claire bearing a child in her arms, her feet sinking deep into soft turf with every step. These sights are wondrous to behold, and, in their embodiment of Stygian souls, they leave the rest of the movie looking superfluous. Even if you loathe von Trier, then, and whatever the weather, please resist the lure of video on demand and go see “Melancholia” where it belongs. As Justine’s mother says of marriage, and as the movie tries to say of mortal life, so we should say of cinema: “Enjoy it while it lasts.” ♦